It was midnight, a new moon. The streets were devoid of people, all safely hiding within their homes, whether that meant a hovel, a cottage, or a palace. With the wind howling and the hail pelting the windows and walls, no one would step out their door. At the doors of the Royal Library, though, there was an unmistakable knocking.

The librarian had gone home for the night, the security had been dismissed, and the giant wing of the castle held only one person. An old man, stooped and wrinkled with age, with cunning little eyes and a sharp ear. He was poring over ancient runes, holding a candle in his spindly hands when the first knock sounded. The blizzard outside raged terribly, but he didn’t budge from his seat. His runes, his work, was far more important than the life of some pauper without a roof.

But the knocking continued, fervent and irritating. Finally he got up, grabbed his cane and hobbled over to the door. Throwing the double doors wide open he prepared to unleash his fury. But no one was there. On the ground lay a woman, her skin pale, translucent, stung by the cold. Her clothes were ragged, torn, she was obviously a beggar. She looked healthy, not the disgusting emaciated vermin that pestered him on his evening walks. But the old man didn’t pay a second thoughts to all those things. Everything else about her was shadowed by her stomach. She was pregnant, too young for it by the look of her face. She was too weak as well.

She lay there, and despite his gentle kick to her cheek, she didn’t wake up. The old man sighed, he would’ve shoved her onto the street and closed the door, but the peasants didn’t need another reason to protest. Taking her shoulders, he dragged her into the room and walked off to the infirmary to call a midwife.

It was Madame Miri that was tending to the sick. It was his rotten luck. Decades before, she had been a flame of his, a flame that had been unceremoniously put out by her father marrying her to a cobbler. The cobbler had died years before, but Miri still insisted on the inane peasant being her one true love. She was loved by everyone in the castle, with her silver hair and rosy cheeks, a grandmother to all the children, a wonderful nurse to all those who were ill. But she was an idiot, he reminded himself, for not tearing herself away from the memories of the dead.

“Good evening, Miri,” he greeted her.

“Master Bartholomew,” came her warm reply. He wanted to rejoice in her friendliness, but she offered the same warmth to the little prince’s dog. Her kindness was universal.

“There is a woman, passed out in the Royal Library,” he said. “Pregnant, you might want to send a midwife.”

“Poor dear, likely got caught in the blizzard…”

“Yes, yes, poor dear indeed. If you could get her out of my way, I have some very important work to attend to tonight.”

“Of course, Master Bartholomew,” she answered seriously. “It was kind of you to let her in.”

“Had no other choice. The peasants are rebelling enough as it is. We don’t need a pregnant woman’s corpse at the steps of the Royal Library. The ruckus they would make…”

“Yes, it was logical,” Miri commented. It had been years since Bartholomew had done something kind out of the goodness of his heart. Even when she had known him, he had always been keen on using his brain more than his heart, claiming that the heart was fragile, a weakness. She didn’t understand how he was such an expert, considering she didn’t think that he had one.

The midwife, a lean woman with a bean pole figure and a perpetual cold sauntered into the library as if she owned it. Bartholomew made a note to himself to get her fired, no servant should walk with that kind of freedom. She walked over to the unconscious woman and slapped her cheeks a few times.

“Wha- where am I? Who are you?”

The woman’s voice was angelic. Bartholomew’s attention was drawn away from the runes for a second. Her words had the clarity that only education gave, the softness in her voice becoming and elegant. She was no beggar. He snapped his head back to the ruins. Of course she was a beggar. He made another note to himself to stop reading the modern novels for amusement, they were getting to his head.

Suddenly a scream sounded. The midwife rushed off, and Bartholomew realized it was probably to fetch towels, water, whatever was needed for a delivery. So much for his peace. Thanks to the rebellion, his beloved library had become a birthing chamber. He openly frowned, not looking in the direction of the woman writhing on the ground and headed out of the room to his own personal chambers.

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He spread the ancient scroll onto his desk and studied it. He had finished half of the task, had searched through every inch of Raya and found himself a dragon’s soul. And what a soul it was, black to the core, cursed and more powerful than the king’s army. But it meant nothing without the second half. The writing on the scroll had faded with the centuries, but he slowly made out the letters.

“A newborn child born on the night without moon, with their innocent soul, they are the only ones capable of bearing the weight of the dragon’s soul, the evil.”

A newborn child. It was the answer. Bartholomew reveled in the simplicity of it. All he needed was a child, born on a new moon. It was simple in theory, but finding such a child would be difficult. No parent would let his child go through the torture of bearing two souls.

Someone knocked at his door and he furrowed his eyebrows in frustration. He hated when people disturbed him while he was thinking. He grudgingly got up and opened the door. Miri stood at the door, tears in her eyes and a wriggling bundle in her arms.

“Her mother’s died, but we managed to save the child,” she breathed. She knew he wouldn’t care, but she had been possessed by the urge to tell him, of all people. It shocked her as she stood in front of him, saying the words. He was a machine. He wouldn’t care.

A child born on the new moon, the runes played out in his head. The stars were in his favor. He had found the vessel for the soul. He ushered Miri in, surprising her.

“Her mother’s dead?” he asked her, as if he was asking about the weather.

“Yes, the poor girl was too weak, kissed the child once before she..”

Miri didn’t know why she was so affected. She was caring and affectionate, but she had seen death before and never been as shaken. The desperation in the woman’s blue eyes, the fear in them, Miri knew those eyes would haunt her in her dreams, her nightmares.

“I’ll adopt her,” Bartholomew said. “The child. She will be my ward.”

Miri gawked at the wrinkled old man before her. He had never given an iron pence to any charity, not as far as she could remember. Adopting an orphan, that too, a girl without anything, it was out of character. Her suspicion acted up.

“Master Bartholomew, although that is kind. For people of our age, the burden of a chi-”

Bartholomew knew what the old woman was trying to do. He had sounded overeager. She would take the child away from him. He saw it in the way she leaned towards the door, the way her arms held the infant tighter than before.

He sighed, and tried to put on a sad face. “I’ve never had family, no children. You know how lonely my life has been, Miri. Besides, the burden of a child is nothing compared to my wealth.”

The old woman’s face softened. Perhaps the old kook had finally grown a heart. She looked at the little girl in her arms, sleeping peacefully, not knowing how unstable her life was, without a mother, without anything in the world to her name. Not even a name, Miri realized with a pang.

Bartholomew was rich. If anything, the girl would be well cared for. He was without a heart, but he wasn’t without his honor. She gingerly handed the baby over to him, and his wrinkled hands looked onto the child’s face with joy. But she couldn’t place something on his face, a strange emotion that she knew wasn’t normal happiness. He suddenly looked up at her.

“Miri, find a wet nurse, arrange a room for the child, now,” he added the last word with commanding tone that he used when he was impatient. Miri hurried out of the room, leaving him alone with the baby in his arms. He closed the door, balancing the sleeping baby carefully in his other arm.

Bartholomew placed her on his study table and rushed to the other side of the room. Digging through his drawers, he finally pulled out the carefully hidden small gold tube. It was an expensive vessel, for a far more precious cargo. The child at the other end of the room started to whimper. He grimaced, knowing it wouldn’t be long before the whimper turned into an ear-shattering wail. Although he had no children of his own, he knew what they entailed. Sleepless nights, disgusting odors, and a never-ending headache. Thank goodness the servants would take care of that.

He wrapped his hand around the vial and carried it towards the baby. As he had predicted, the whimpering sounds had gotten longer, more irritating. Before the child could protest, he dumped the few drops of the bittersweet golden liquid into her open mouth. The cries stopped immediately.

For a second Bartholomew paused as the infant’s amber eyes shut slowly. He might’ve killed her. Perhaps she wasn’t innocent enough, perhaps she had been born a few seconds before the new moon. Perhaps all his work was wasted.

But her eyes opened. Instead of the amber that he expected, they were a deep, dark blue, with slivers of black scattered throughout them like wisps of smoke. He smiled at the change. His work had finally come to fruition. He had the thing that all his contemporaries, wise men and wizards alike, only dreamed of.

Her future would be difficult. She would be a terror if left uncontrolled. But he would discipline her, teach her to control what was inside of her. Bartholomew held the infant in his arms as she cried, rocking her to sleep.

Miri came back in with the wet nurse to find Bartholomew sitting in his armchair, his arms around the child, both of them sleeping peacefully. It was a strange sight, seeing a heartless man clutching a stranger’s child to his heart, taking her into his empty life. Miri abandoned her thoughts. It was a good thing he was doing, one of the few good things that he had ever done. As for the girl, she would have an interesting future at the least.